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Clinton Team Targeted Jones' Sexual History

October 20, 1998|By From Tribune News Services.

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS — In the shadow of renewed settlement efforts, a federal judge released 724 pages of previously secret materials in the Paula Jones lawsuit Monday, disclosing efforts by President Clinton's legal team to make an issue of Jones' sexual history.

The documents showed that, in a filing in January, Clinton's lawyers told the court they had testimony from a man who alleged he had sex with Jones in his car in a bar parking lot on their first encounter.

A few weeks later, Jones initiated a sex act with the man, the president's lawyers alleged. The encounters, the lawyers said, occurred just months before the episode in which Jones alleged she was emotionally distressed when then-Gov. Bill Clinton propositioned her for a similar sex act at an Arkansas hotel in May 1991.

Jones' lawsuit accused the president of making a crude, unwanted sexual advance.

The newly disclosed testimony cited by Clinton's lawyers alleged a consensual encounter with Jones. The lawyers argued in their court filing it was relevant as rebuttal evidence if Jones "should assert at any trial that she was an innocent minister's daughter" or was "emotionally traumatized" by a suggestion she perform a sex act.

Other materials made public on the Internet by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright included written testimony by the president and court documents that Monica Lewinsky filed trying to avoid becoming a witness in the case, which ultimately prompted an impeachment inquiry.

The release came as a settlement in the lawsuit remained elusive and lawyers on both sides prepared to make arguments Tuesday before a federal appeals court in St. Paul, considering whether to reinstate Jones' lawsuit accusing the president of sexual harassment.